by Rick Parris

“There are more things in heaven and earth…”

It ranks right up there with the existential majesty of “To be or not to be.” The question of whether to go with an open source software solution or to go with a closed source proprietary application. While there are some open source zealots that believe that everything should be open source all the time, there are few closed source zealots with the same nearly religious conviction. So the question that occurs is this, if we have a choice between Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and expensive proprietary applications, shouldn’t the choice be obvious? Isn’t free always better? Is it just corporate FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) campaigns that make individuals and organizations decide against the no cost option? That, it seems to me, must be some serious FUD.

Consumers of software are sensible, right? They can do math. They understand the difference between free and expensive. So, why do they ever choose proprietary systems over FOSS equivalents?

The real criteria
I think most decision makers have a simple answer for this question. Quality, Effectiveness, and Real World Cost. These are the considerations business budget watchers have to keep in mind every day. The difference between a product you choose and a product you avoid is the answer to a few simple questions. Does it work? Not just get the job done, does it do the job you need it to do extremely well? Does it inspire trust and confidence in the staff who use it? Are there complaints from the real end users, the folks on the front line? If it’s used to create or deliver a product to your client, is that product going to make you proud or embarrass you? Do I need an IT team to make it work? If I need it serviced, am I going to be at the whims of a community bulletin board?

These are the real world considerations of any small, medium or large organization. The decision makers in these organizations shouldn’t care whether the product being evaluated is FOSS or proprietary. They should only care about the answers to those questions. That said, which does a better job in those terms? This is the crux of the debate. Many have weighed in here, but here’s the way I see it… There is nothing that drives innovation like a profit motive. There is nothing that makes a small business-person strive to create great software like the possibility that, one day, they might not be running a small business.

It’s hard out here for an entrepreneur…
Here’s a hint, running a small business is hard. To get an idea how hard it is to start and run a small business I’d suggest you go find a school bus. Once you find a school bus, you need to get underneath it and pick it up. Once you’ve got it in the air you’ll need to run down the street and throw the bus to jump start it (you made sure it was in gear and the key was turned on right?). Then, once it starts, run to catch up to it, hop in and drive away. That’s about how easy it is to start a small business. Ask anyone who’s done it. People who start a business do it so that one day they won’t have to worry about rent, sure… but they also do it because they have a passion to do it. That’s why they work so hard to create a great product. That’s why they stand behind their product. They want their customers to be happy because happy customers will one day help to buy their new house.

Profit motive is a great motivation to create great software. It just is.

Dude, relax, share the load, join our commune
On the other side you have Open Source development communities. In my experience these communities are both the bane and the boon of open source. There are some communities that have great leadership and great organizations. Sometimes, as in the case of Linus Torvalds, you have a leader of such intellectual and personal strength that the community is run effectively as a small business… or perhaps a small commune. These communes are, at there most effective, meritocracies where the best code makes it into the product. At their worst they are political nightmares where the most popular coders determine what gets into the product. This then is the problem with open source solutions. They can be great when they’re great and they can be horrifying when they’re bad. If they were a small business when they were great they’d be successful and when they were bad they’d go out of business. But a community doesn’t need to go out of business. It can go on forever being bad or worse, mediocre.

What keeps a community together is the commune, not the profit.

Adam Smith vs Karl Marx?
So, you say, we’re just recapitulating the cold war. The capitalist, for-profit proprietary system appears better than the communist, for-the-greater-good open source system. Let’s not get too hasty. I personally do believe that for-profit companies make the best software. But I also think they make some of the worst, far worse than any open source efforts. You see, in fact I can have it both ways.

Let’s look at the different kind of for-profit companies developing applications. There are the small to mid-sized privately held companies and there are the large, publicly traded corporations. The entrepreneurs and the capitalists. The entrepreneurs are the type of business we were looking at earlier. These are the innovators of our industry. These are the folks who are in the trenches with their clients, who see the problems that really need solutions and get the big ideas to solve them. These are the builders of better mousetraps. These are the folks who actually have or know someone who has mice. Google and HP and Apple and Microsoft… all of them started out here. If you can name the founder of a big corporation it’s because he or she started out as one of these typically American individuals. Brin, Jobs, Gates, Ford, Edison. Before they were heads of corporations they were small business owners.

Then something happens, something also very American. They cash in. They either sell their business to a larger corporation or they go public, selling their company to shareholders. They get rewarded for creating something of value and, in a sense, they are shown exactly how valuable their creation is. For the creator it is the American dream come true. But what does it mean for the product? Up until that point the purpose of the company is to develop the very best product possible. From that point onward the purpose of the company is to make as much money for the investors as possible. The mission changes. The client and their problems, finding great solutions, all of that becomes a means to an end instead of an end in itself. And, I believe this is the situation where we see the worst software development. The goals of the entrepreneur and the goals of the open source community are the same; to make great software. The goal of the publicly held corporation is different; to show continued stock price growth.

A publicly traded company isn’t in the business of making great products anymore.

Are there publicly traded corporations that still make great software? Of course. Adobe’s IPO was in the mid 80s and they continue to create some great applications. But anyone who’s been using Photoshop or Illustrator since the early years knows that the software has shown an increased tendency toward bloat. Microsoft’s software offerings were fantastic before their IPO. After that, almost everyone recognizes their success hasn’t been based on the excellence of their development. They have become a third rate software business with a first rate market cap. And this is the other danger of publicly held companies, they often seek to develop and maintain an unfair competitive advantage that suppresses further innovation in that marketspace.

Three choices, not two
So let’s look at all three of these systems for application development; open source, entrepreneurial, and capitalistic. Let’s look at the good and the bad of each.

In the open source arena you’ve got PHP, a truly robust server side scripting language. This is my favorite example of FOSS because it’s wonderfully well organized. Visit the PHP site for a look at their support structure. Brilliant. On the downside? I offer Open Office and Moodle as examples of how not to do open source. Open Office is a poor replacement for Microsoft’s Office… and that is really saying something. It turns out hatred of Microsoft is not enough motivation to create great alternatives. And Moodle? I attended a seminar on using Moodle at a trade show recently. 50 people sat with laptops as a vendor, whose business was based on hosting Moodle, offered excuses and frank explanations of all the things “Moodle doesn’t do very well.” With Moodle one is faced with a technically intimidating installation, a difficult set-up, and a product that looks bad when it’s working perfectly.

In the entrepreneurial arena I need to point to the iPhone App Store and it’s 75,000 available apps. So far nearly two billion (yes that’s with a “B”) applications have been downloaded. The great majority of these are being developed by small businesses, in many cases single developers working away in their homes. I sue an application purchased on the App Store every day. It’s called Dual Level by a small firm called Geometry. It does what you’d expect, it turns any iPhone into a bubble level that is, in my everyday use, as accurate as any actual small bubble level on the market. If you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch, borrow a friends long enough to explore the App Store. It’s a hive of brilliant software development. A bad example of entrepreneurial application development is, and I hate to say this, Toon Boom Studio by Toon Boom Animation, Inc.. This is an application for creating old fashioned 2-dimnesional, cell animation. The reason I hate to say it is because I use the software quite a bit and I sort of love it because I can’t find anything that does what it does so well. That said, it is badly developed software in my opinion. It is a mess. It’s interface is needlessly complex and buggy, it’s hard to learn, it’s featured to death, it’s inconsistent in its metaphor. The fault isn’t in Toon Boom’s intent. The problem seems to be that the folks behind it are actually too creative. They need to be reined in. That can be a problem with passionate entrepreneurs.

Finally let’s look at the capitalist model. Hands down the winner is Adobe Photoshop. 20 years as the preeminent image editing application is not an accident. This is an application that allows anyone to do things that, 20 years ago, could only be done by a studio of photographers and airbrush artists. It’s no wonder it has become a popular culture verb. And, yes, it has gotten a bit swollen around the middle existing as it does without a serious competitor. The latest version, CS4, is much more burdened by unnecessary features and interface distractions than its predecessors. But, if you make your living using it, you still can’t live without it. It still does everything so easily and seamlessly, one forgets the sheer volume of calculations that the program is doing when one adds a Gaussian blur, for example. And of course the worst example of capitalist application development is simple too. Microsoft Word. Followed closely by the rest of the Office pack. This is an application that suffers from all of the downfalls of capitalized businesses. It’s market share is it’s enemy. Everyone buys Office because everyone buys Office. Everyone hates it, at least everyone who has to actually use it to do anything. If there were an open standard and a healthy competitive atmosphere, nearly any small business could compete. Word processor apps aren’t that hard to develop. But Office has the lock on the marketspace and their product has become bloated, overly featured, and annoying. Simple things like scrolling or cutting and pasting require conscious thought on the part of the user. These are things we shouldn’t have to think about. This is why the sheer lameness of Open Office is so disappointing. Wouldn’t you love to can Word? I would.

The final analysis
So, that’s how I see the Open and Closed issue. It’s not so much Open vs Closed as it is Communism vs Entrepreneurialism vs Captalism. In my book, Entrepreneurialism wins hands down. I even love my bad example in that category. Second place goes to Communism. While that system doesn’t do a good job of weeding out the losers, it’s still powered by passion and that has produced PHP, which I couldn’t live without. And bringing up the rear are the Capitalists. They are no longer driven by a passion to create but by pressure to perform. While I love Photoshop and many other Big Corporate titles, I can’t abide the apps that are both horrible and a suppressor of true innovation.

But I’ll bet you have another opinion. If you do, leave it in the comments.

Rick Parris has been developing interactive training solutions for 25 years. He runs Standard Imagination, a small eLearning business, from his home in Warrenton, Virginia.